Welcome back to the podcast, Brib, Swindle, or Steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're talking about an excellent new book, Willful Blindness,

How a Network of Narcos, Tycoons, and CCP Agents Infiltrated the West.

My guest is the author Sam Cooper. Sam is on the

National Investigations team with Global News in Ottawa. Prior to joining global news in 2018,

Sam reported for the Vancouver Province and Vancouver Sun in British Columbia, where most of the

action in this book takes place. He focuses on political corruption, organized crime,

financial crime, and holding powerful figures to account. Sam's book shot straight to the top

of the bestsellers list in Canada, and in many ways is the culmination of the years-long saga,

which has been followed by financial crime experts around the world. Sam, thank you for joining me.

Thanks so much for having me.

We've had at least three characters in your book on this podcast, Attorney General David

Eby, former Crown Prosecutor and current columnist for Canada's National Observer, Sandy Garrosino,

and former Director General of Financial Crime for the RCMP and author of The Dirty Money Reports,

Peter German.

So many of our listeners will be generally familiar with the story.

But perhaps you could start by summarizing this strange and disturbing Rubik's cube of

international bad actors for us.

All of those guests come from legal backgrounds.

Great respect for all of them.

All of them have, as my police or intelligence friends would say,

a lot of visibility on the story,

...